Full name: Montagu Denis Wyatt Don
Age: 60.
Appearance: The Gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a couple of rumpled decades after his prime.
Occupation: Gardening controversialist.
Isn’t that an oxymoron? He’s a Cambridge man, actually.
Answer the question. Gardening may appear a sweet and civilised pastime, but Monty has sent shockwaves through the nation’s flowerbeds.
How? He’s launched a stinging attack on ...
Yes, go on, say it. BEGONIAS!
Crikey, this is serious. What’s his problem? He thinks they are “repulsively ugly”.
It’s all subjective, surely. Floral beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, but there is something deeper afoot in his attack, almost a philosophy of gardening.
Tell me more. In 2000, in a column in the Observer, he spelt out his loathing of begonias. “If begonias were a song, they would be the kind of maudlin croon performed by a ‘family entertainer’ in a toupee. The leaves have a bat’s-wing quality, with colourings reminiscent of the pavement outside a pub at closing time on a Saturday night.”
This is just arrant anti-begonia prejudice. No, there is a logic, spelt out in another column in 2006, in which he described bedding plants as “a desire for instant colour and makeover effects ... one-stop gardening – disposable, dramatic and needing no knowledge beyond which way up to stick the plant in the ground.”
All bedding plants? Not all, but he especially dislikes tropical plants such as begonias because they’re loud and showy, inappropriate in an English garden, and probably won’t survive a cold spring.
A Little Englander! When it comes to gardening perhaps, though he has declared his support for remain in the referendum.
Garden centres must love him. He doesn’t see his role as selling their plants. He had a bust-up with them a couple of years ago when they said his advice to wait until April before planting led to a commercially disastrous spring season.
Who would have thought gardening could be so acrimonious? Monty, the rebellious son of a posh family who has talked openly about his battles with depression and seasonal affective disorder, kowtows to no one. As TV gardeners go, he has definite hinterland.
Not to be confused with: Alan Titchmarsh.
Do mention: Primroses, harbinger of depression-lifting spring and his favourite flower.
Don’t mention: B*******.
